I mentioned in my last post a recent visit to London. It was part of a longer decidedly awesome family trip. London’s obscenely expensive. But I think it’s valuable to music fans that I recap some of what found by way of obsessively searching for music history there (and everywhere…).
I arrived with my casually curated list of sites worth finding. Given the recent phenomenon of The Beatles documentary “Get Back” and my interest in the bespoke tailoring history along Saville Row (for my other work), we set out to find the former home of Apple Records. It had most recently been an Abercrombie and Fitch showroom - not exactly a tribute worthy of the building where The Beatles last performed live. We stayed in Camden Town, mainly to be close to Regent’s Park. There was a theatre now named Koko around the corner from our flat that had been a punk venue where everyone played back in the 1970s. North London’s musical history more broadly isn’t hard to find. Amy Winehouse fans know about her statue up yonder. I sought out the exterior steps in Camden Market where The Clash shot the cover photo of their debut album. I’d hoped to venture further afield to see the former church (St. Augustine) where the iconic Wessex Sound Studios operated for 40 years. Former Beatles’ manager George Martin bought that studio in 1965. That’s where The Clash recorded “London Calling” and the Sex Pistols did the same with their debut album. Queen recorded “Bohemian Rhapsody” there. Everyone from the UK seemingly recorded there, including the Rolling Stones, XTC, and Pete Townsend. Then it was sold in 2003 and eventually converted into posh apartments collectively named “The Recording Studio.” Wessex’s advanced (for the time…) 40-channel console lives on in a studio in South Wales as of 2011. Music nerds surely make the trek there to this day in hopes of feeling a karmic echo.
In many ways, that’s some of what I do with my tour of Seattle’s cultural geography. Seek out places worth knowing and dig deeper for what’s beneath the obvious. Connect those places with stories and you’ve got yourself a time machine worth hopping aboard in hopes of better understanding why the music made there still matters. As I continue to learn from people on their own treks through Seattle, cultural history lives on. I sometimes make the unpopular point of saying that “grunge is dead.” Because it is as a musical genre rooted in a time and a place (the Pacific Northwest more broadly, although so many still associate it with Seattle in the ‘90s). One of my larger points, however, is that by better understanding where things happened you can make your own judgments about why it might’ve mattered in the present and (hopefully) future. Or at least, it’s fun to imagine things with the benefit of hindsight as you wander through what often times only exist as ruins.
Back to London - Soho as a part of the City of Winchester in the West End offers a target-rich environment for such exploration. Even just reading the engraved plaques on buildings scratches that itch. The English far better than us in Seattle put up historical markers. There are official circular blue-colored plaques about the size of a medium pizza pan bolted to buildings all over the place. Soho’s seemingly covered with them, especially in the areas around Denmark Street. Not everything gets a blue plaque - Paul McCartney’s offices and former squats used by David (Jones) Bowie or the Sex Pistols give just a few harder-to-find examples. But if you search for places like The Marquee Club or No. Tom Guitars, you’ll be pleased to see that over time there’s been a broad focus on marking those locations with a good starting point in the narrative. We here in Seattle can learn a great deal from what’s been put up all over London. I’ve been saying for the past few years that we desperately need to start putting up the sort of markers that London uses to remind people what happened all around them maybe not so long ago. When a City with only 170-ish years of history is so busy booming and occasionally busting, there’s only so much energy put into pointing people toward what was there previously.
If you want to go deeper into London’s history, I recommend starting with a walking tour we found through Airbnb that covered Soho. Evren runs it with real heart and soul, as a musician who’s looking to share what he knows. Followed by sitting with you in the pub to talk more about his own journey through the London scene. I was glad I connected with him as a fellow music fan and nostalgia merchant. His wife and brother-in-law were even along for the ride the day my wife, daughter, and I booked that experience. Good peeps, half a world away.
I feel a kinship with people seeking out cultural understanding from the places where music is made. Let me know if you have your own favorite cities with musical histories worth exploring. I’m reminded of a tour I led here in Seattle for a German chocolate company’s very hip executives who chose their corporate retreats based on the music history they wanted to explore. Their visit prior to Seattle was San Francisco. Where I also lived for a few years and loved the history found all over the map. Although I never saw blue plaques or their American equivalent there either. Although those hip chocolate titans did pay Phil Lesh from The Grateful Dead to sit down with them and give a guitar workshop. They didn’t get that sort of craft instruction from me. But I like to think I bring other talents to the stage. What those talents are, I’ll leave open for debate. Rock on.
